Exporting and importing products

Exporting and importing products allows you to bulk upload your listings from one Tictail shop to another, or from another shopping platform (such as Shopify, Etsy, Squarespace or Storenvy) to Tictail. Instead of loading each product individually, all you need to do is create and save a CSV file for a quick and seamless transfer, which makes creating or updating your shop a breeze!

Exporting your products

1. Go to the Products view in your dashboard.

2. Click the three dots on the right-hand side of the search bar to open up the menu.

3. Under Export current view, select which format you want to use to export your products. We support both CSV (recommended) and XLS (Excel).

4. Wait until the export job completes. Feel free to do something else or even close your browser tab while you wait.

5.When the export is completed, it will show up under Recent exports. Click the link and download the newly created export file.

The export will contain all pages of all products in the current view. This means that you can export a subset of your products by filtering with a search query.

Importing products

You can import products from multiple sources, such as:

A CSV file from a Tictail product export - or one that you build yourself, see example below..

A CSV file from an Etsy product listing export.

A CSV file from a Shopify product export.

A CSV file from a Storenvy product export.

A JSON file from a Squarespace product export (see below for how to do it).

4. In the next step you'll be able to review the number of products you've selected to be imported. To start the import, click Start import.

5. Wait until the import completes. Depending on how many products you've submitted to be imported, this may take a while. Feel free to close your browser tab in the meantime. The Import link will indicate if the import is in progress or not, and you can click it again to see a detailed progress bar.

You can import at most 1000 products at a time. If you want to import more products than that, you need to split your CSV file into multiple files, each with at most 1000 products.

Importing products from another Tictail shop, or from a custom made CSV file

See "Exporting your products" in the above text on how to export a CSV of your products.

You can also manually create a CSV file with product data to import. Use this example file as a starting point. The columns that are used for import are:

Product ID. Leave this as it is if you're working on an export. For new products, leave it empty.

Title. If consecutive lines contain the same Title, they are treated as variations of the same product. The first line specifies the general details about the product - such as description, images, etc. - as well as the first variation of the product. The subsequent lines specify the additional product variations.

Slug. The "handle" of your product, used to build the product's URL, both on the marketplace and custom shop. Leave empty to generate a slug based on the product title (and you can always edit this later).

Status. You can specify if a product should be imported as published (live on your shop) or unpublished (the default, which is not visible to customers) in the Status column.

Image URLs. You can specify multiple images per product in the Image URLs column. Separate the image URLs by commas.

Description.

Category ID. The ID (32 characters long) of the category for the product. Only really useful if you're working on a previous export, leave empty otherwise.

Variation ID. Leave this as it is if you're working on an export. For new products or variations, leave it empty.

Variation Title. If you have more than one variation for your product you must provide a Variation Title for each variation.

Variation SKU.

Variation Original Price. The original price of the variation, specified as a decimal number without any currency symbols, and with dot (.) as the decimal separator. Example: 14.99. Incorrect values: $14.99 or 14,99 kr.

Variation Sale Price. Use the same format as for the Variation Original Price.

Variation Sale Active. Set to true to mark the sale price as active.

Quantity. Set to the infinity symbol (∞) to set an unlimited quantity on the product variation.

Our product import process is quite lenient, so if you e.g. specify invalid prices or quantities we'll still import the product, but use default values.

You can use a Tictail CSV export from your own shop to update your existing products. The procedure is:

Export your products to a CSV file.

Edit the CSV file*

Import the CSV file. You'll be able to see how many new products will be added, and how many existing products will be updated, before you start the import. You'll get the option to decide whether to proceed with the merge, or import the products as if they were new.

* You can remove products from the CSV that you don't want to update. You cannot use the CSV import to remove products from your shop - existing products not found in the CSV will not be updated.

During the merge import, the CSV is considered the master, and overwrites all data for the product for the columns specified above. This means that you can edit the CSV to add, edit and remove variations.

We use the "Product ID" and "Variation ID" columns from the CSV to find which existing products to update.

Importing products from Etsy

The Etsy CSV export does not include prices and quantity for the individual variations. This import will set the same price and quantity on all imported variations. It will mark all imported products as unpublished (not visible to shoppers), to allow you to verify the products before showing them.

Importing products from Shopify

Importing products from Squarespace

Squarespace doesn't have a way to directly export your products to a CSV file, but they do have an API you can use to export your products in JSON. Download that JSON data to a file, and you can import it to your Tictail shop:

Sign in to Squarespace - go to https://[your-squarespace-domain.com]/config/.

Browse to https://[your-squarespace-domain.com]/api/1/commerce/products.

Save that page as a file on your computer. Use Cmd+S if you're using a Mac, Ctrl+S if you're using Windows. You can also go to the top menu -> File -> Save As...

If you're using Chrome, just save the file as it is.

If you're using Firefox, make sure you select Format: Web Page, HTML only when you save. This will save the data as-is, and will result in a JSON file.

If you're using Safari, make sure you select Format: Page Source when you save.

If you're using Edge:

Click the ... menu in the top right corner.

Click "Open with Internet Explorer".

In the "View Downloads" popup, click "Save as" under "Actions.

Select "Save as type: JSON" and save the file.

You've now exported your Squarespace products to a JSON file. Import this to your Tictail shop by selecting "Squarespace JSON" in the Import screen.

Importing products from Storenvy

Glossary

What is a CSV file? A CSV file is a list of comma-separated values, and is a standard file format for data exports. CSV files can be opened by all spreadsheet programs, like Excel, Numbers, and Google Spreadsheets, and it can also be edited by regular text edit programs like Notepad and TextEdit. The first line of the file is consists of the column names, while the rest is the actual data.

Technically we require all CSV files to be encoded as UTF-8 (which is the default text encoding in most software and services). This means we can properly support all languages, and emojis 💪😼.

To export a CSV file from Numbers: Go to File -> Export To -> CSV..., then click Next and Export. This is also a way you can fix any issues with text encoding: Numbers will export your CSV as UTF-8.

To export a CSV file from Google Spreadsheets: Go to File -> Download as -> Comma-separated values (.csv, current sheet).